Emily Pawley
Cataloging Nature: Standardizing Fruit
Varieties in the United States,
1800–1860
The forests and fields of the early American republic teemed
with individually varying seedling fruit trees. American nurserymen stabilized both this chaotic landscape and their trade
by promoting named fruit “varieties” gleaned from domestic
orchards and from a global network of botanical gardens.
Developing strategies to regulate the production of names
and descriptions, they altered both texts and organisms, replacing a profusion of “wild” trees with a negotiated list of “named
varieties.” Examining this process reveals intersections
between commercial and scientific credibility and illuminates
the alternative business forms built around living goods.
B
uried in the New York State Agricultural Society’s Transactions for
1842 is a short, irritable essay called “Hints on Describing Fruit.” Its
author was John J. Thomas, who, in his early thirties, had just followed
his father into the nursery business in Macedon, New York.1 Bemoaning
the state of American fruit culture, Thomas complained, “A good fruit
garden is at the present moment a great rarity in most parts of our
country.” He attributed this to problems that were textual as well as
physical: “The numerous errors in the names of fruits” made it hard to
procure “those which are genuine,” a problem compounded by “the multiplication of new varieties” and by “the meagreness, looseness, and inaccuracy of nearly all books of descriptions.”2 Worse, Thomas argued, the
circulation of fruit trees around the nation fundamentally challenged the
act of description itself. When moved, varieties changed. Thus, the Virgalieu pear, prized in New York, became in Boston “an outcast,
1
“John Jacob Thomas,” in Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, ed. Liberty Hyde Bailey
(London, 1907), 1797.
2
John J. Thomas, “Hints on Describing Fruits,” in Transactions of the New York State
Agricultural Society (Albany, 1843), 269.
Business History Review 90 (Autumn 2016): 405–429. doi:10.1017/S0007680516000726
© 2016 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. ISSN 0007-6805; 2044-768X (Web).
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Emily Pawley / 406
intolerable even to sight.”3 Clearly the networks of print and plant distribution that constituted the mid-nineteenth-century nursery business sat
uneasily together.
Equally clearly, these networks were transformative. While Thomas
fretted, the kinds of orchards he called a “rarity”—filled with named,
grafted fruit—were spreading quickly, displacing a landscape of semiferal seedling trees. Writing two years later, in 1845, Thomas’s fellow
nurseryman and author Andrew Jackson Downing boasted, “the planting of fruit-trees in one of the newest States numbers nearly a quarter
of a million in a single year.”4 The 1850 federal census, evaluating
trees and fruits for the first time, valued them at $7.7 million—a
number that would climb to $20 million by 1860.5 Within a few
decades, a new commercial landscape would emerge, one populated
largely by trees that had been funneled through networks of
nurserymen.6
This movement of fruit trees was part of a much larger shift: the
wave of introduced or created varieties of plants and animals that
swept across the recently appropriated lands of the new United States.
A recent body of scholarship has shown that such “biological innovations” were crucial to the expanding American economy; just as new
varieties of cotton allowed cotton culture to stretch into the rich soil of
the black belt, new varieties of wheat made it possible for American
farmers to multiply the American wheat crop by eight.7 However,
3
Ibid., 270.
Andrew J. Downing, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (New York, 1845), vi.
5
James D. B. De Bow, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, D.C.,
1853), 153, lxxxiii; Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States: Compiled from the
Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C., 1864), 186.
6
Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, “Planting a Seed: The Nineteenth-Century Horticultural Boom in
America,” Business History Review 78 (Autumn 2004): 381–421; Ulysses P. Hedrick, A
History of Horticulture in America to 1860 (Portland, Ore., 1988); Daniel J. Kevles, “Fruit
Nationalism: Horticulture in the United States—From the Revolution to the First Centennial,”
in Aurora Torealis, ed. Marco Beretta, Karl Grandin, and Svante Lindqvist (Sagamore Beach,
Mass., 2008), 129–46; Philip Pauly, Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of
America (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Erica Hannickel, Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in
America (Philadelphia, 2013).
7
Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and
American Agricultural Development (Cambridge, U.K., 2008). See also Daniel J. Kevles, “Protections, Privileges, and Patents: Intellectual Property in American Horticulture,” Proceedings
of the American Philosophical Society, 152 (June 2008): 207–13; Daniel J. Kevles, “New
Blood, New Fruits: Protections for Breeders and Originators, 1789–1930,” in Making and
Unmaking Intellectual Property, ed. Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee
(Chicago, 2011); Deborah Fitzgerald, The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois,
1890–1920 (Ithaca, 1990); and Tom Okie, “Under the Trees: The Georgia Peach and the
Quest for Labor in the Twentieth Century,” Agricultural History 85 (Jan. 2011): 72–101.
For more global histories, see Jack Ralph Kloppenburg Jr., First the Seed: The Political
Economy of Plant Biotechnology (Madison, Wisc., 2005); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and
Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); and
4
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Cataloging Nature / 407
American markets moved more than just staple goods. Fruits and fruit
trees found an ecological niche in the expanding culture of gentility, as
recognizable proof of taste and refinement.
Chopped into cuttings that we would now call clones, grafted fruit
trees became an easily shipped, varied, and beautiful product.
However, businesses selling living things—seeds, cuttings, and living
plants and animals—differ sharply from the markets that most histories
of business have examined. On the one hand, living goods could not be
improvised. While American provincial workshops might independently
make elegant chairs out of local wood, the fruit tree trade required the
maintenance of the social links through which genetic material
passed.8 On the other hand, living goods are often both product and
means of production. While a single silk ribbon could not become the
ancestor of a population of identical ribbons, or escape from the
control of its owner to produce a landscape full of chaotic offspring,
fruit trees could and did.
Though Thomas was seated at the heart of the booming tree business,
he was not wrong to complain about words; indeed, his complaint preoccupied most of the nurserymen of his generation. As this article will show,
botanical practices of naming and description were foundational to the
nursery business, allowing nurserymen to participate in an international
network for the movement of varieties while at the same time stabilizing
the identity of a product that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
had been growing freely in North America for two hundred years. In
gaining control of varietal names and reputations, nurserymen would
alter not only words but also the organisms those words described,
replacing a wild profusion of seedlings with a regimented set of named
trees—one that, if imperfectly controlled, was also radically simplified.
To understand how they did so, we must first understand the special
meaning of the concept of the “variety” in the fruit tree trade.
Varieties and Commercial Taxonomy
Early-nineteenth-century agriculturists agreed that variability was a
special quality granted to domesticated species. “By what means the first
tendency to change their nature was given to domesticated plants,”
British horticulturist John Lindley noted, “we are entirely ignorant.”9
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of
the World (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 225–52.
8
For provincial improvisation, see David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material
Culture of Early America (Philadelphia, 2010).
9
John Lindley, quoted in William Robert Prince, The Pomological Manual, vol. 2
(New York, 1831), viii.
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Emily Pawley / 408
Variability not only explained widely differing kinds of dogs, fruit, and
flowers, but also made domesticated animals and plants gloriously
subject to progressive development. Over generations, they could be
manipulated into new forms—“breeds” in the case of animals and “varieties” in the case of plants. For gardeners and farmers, it was in these categories, not in species categories like “cow” and “apple,” that the
characteristics significant to production and ornament appeared.
However, variety was a changeable category, and the particular reproductive characteristics of fruit trees gave it a significant form.
Fruit trees, particularly apple trees, produce astonishingly variable
offspring. Seedlings from the same tree can produce fruits of different
colors, flavors, and shapes that appear at different times of year and
keep for different periods. This instability means that fruit trees
cannot be commercially propagated by seed; the seeds of a fine tree
will produce thousands of bizarre, and often useless, offspring. This variability could produce an astonishing wealth of forms; early catalogs
described striped apples; grey, egg-shaped apples; “twenty ounce”
apples; and the “Surprise Apple,” which was “yellow outside, and red
to the core.”10 However, most seedlings were undistinguished; to the
novice, Andrew Jackson Downing wrote, planting seedlings “appears
. . . a lottery, in which there are too many blanks to the prizes.”11
Only a moment of luck combined with judgment qualified a seedling
to receive a name and description and thereby to become a variety. In
antebellum writing, these moments were cast as discoveries; for
example, Prince boasted of having “discovered” the Sine Qua Non
apple in a Flushing field.12 However, as horticultural author Walter
Elder wrote in the 1840s, this act of discovery fundamentally differed
from the collection of botanical specimens: “The botanist considers a
plant with a double flower a monster—the florist considers it a beauty.
. . . Species are the hobby of the botanist—variation the hobby of the
florist.”13 Where naturalists sought representative individuals, horticulturalists hunted “monsters” and “sports” and dealt in productive oddities. As fruit enthusiasts themselves pointed out, varieties were thus
“the artificial productions of culture.”14
“Discovery” offered the fruit tree a new mode of human-mediated
reproduction. Because fruit seedlings did not resemble their parents,
varieties were propagated asexually. Pieces cut from the original tree
10
Prince & Sons, Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Plants (New York, 1823).
Downing, Fruits and Fruit Trees, 2.
Prince, Pomological Manual, vol. 2, 15.
13
Quoted in Ann Leighton, American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century: “For Comfort
and Affluence” (Amherst, Mass., 1987), 65.
14
Franklin R. Elliott, The Western Fruit Book (New York, 1859), 17.
11
12
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Cataloging Nature / 409
were either placed directly in the ground or, more frequently, as “scions,”
attached to the root system of a different tree, a process called grafting.
Once established, they branched and fruited on their new roots and
could be split again.15 Described today as cloning, this was, in the nineteenth century, sometimes considered to be the creation of a single distributed organism; when the original tree died, many thought, so too
would its scions.16 However, unlike wind-pollinated varieties of wheat
or corn, whose integrity was threatened by every breeze, cuttings
seemed to promise a stable identity over time.
Easily made and cheaply shipped, cuttings and grafted saplings
became the basis of the nursery business. In 1828, correspondents of
Bartram’s Garden could order such trees as the Lady’s Finger and the
Golden Pearmain; the trees’ value, like their promise of sweetness, lay
in their names.17 Unlike a species, the fruit tree variety was not a population of similar individuals encountered in a landscape, but a network of
propagation spreading out from an initial point. It reproduced solely
through networks of exchange, maintained its identity through catalogs
and advertisements, and lived and died entirely according to the dictates
of commercial orchards and consumers.
A Wealth of Seedling Fruit
Of course, grafting was a millennia-old practice when Thomas wrote
his essay; nineteenth-century authors referred with wonder (and skepticism) to a tree described by Pliny the Elder onto which grapes, figs, pears,
pomegranates, and apples had been grafted.18 During the mid-eighteenth century, however, what Thomas would have called a “good fruit
garden” was limited to a small coterie of wealthy American merchants
and planters and the few coastal nurseries that supplied them. For the
majority of American colonists during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, grafted fruit was a little-known luxury.
This did not mean these Americans lacked fruit. The first colonists
brought seeds with them as well as a few cuttings and grafted trees,
which rapidly spread beyond the colonists’ advance: General Sullivan’s
1779 expedition against the Cayugas and Senecas reported orchards
bending with peaches and apples. Pouring westward in the 1790s,
15
Asexual propagation techniques involving cuttings, runners, or split tubers are used for
dozens of other plants, from strawberries to potatoes.
16
Pauly, Fruits and Plains, 65.
17
Robert Carr, Periodical Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs (Philadelphia, 1828), 39.
18
John Bostock and Henry T. Riley, eds., The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 3 (London,
1855), 484.
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Emily Pawley / 410
settlers carried fresh infusions of seeds. Planting new orchards allowed
settlers to negotiate requirements that they improve the land, and landlords often made orchard planting a condition in their leases. Wandering
pigs and cattle, foddered on windfall fruit, carried fruit seeds beyond the
bounds of settler and Native American orchards: apple, plum, and peach
trees sprouted unaided in swamps, fields, and forests.19
By the 1810s, settlers, landlords, Native Americans, and animals had
created a rich American landscape of fruit. However, these orchards
were not the kind Thomas had in mind. A Hudson Valley lease reveals
a typical planting practice. The lessee, it declared, should, “the first
year, strew apple seed or pomace [the refuse of cider pressing] upon a
patch of land for said Farm, for a nursery.”20 Fruits grown in this way
were namelessly variable and often inedible when raw. For most Americans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fruit
became a commodity only when fed to pigs, pressed into cider, or distilled as brandy. These latter uses attracted the ire of temperance advocates; one, having written an article entitled “What Should I Do with My
Apples?” signed himself, “BURN THEM.” It was seedling apples that
would be propagated by the itinerant Swedenborgian nurseryman
John Chapman, or “Johnny Appleseed.”21 By contrast, the “good fruit
gardens” that nurserymen like Thomas hankered for emulated a model
that originated thousands of miles from American shores.
Networked Gardens: Nurserymen in Global Context
In 1824, the Flushing, New York, branch of the Linnaean Society of
Paris celebrated the 115th birthday of the great Swedish botanist Carolus
Linnaeus. First launching “the new and elegant boat Linnaeus” in Manhattan, flying flags inscribed with Linnaeus’s name, society members proceeded to the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nurseries—the nursery of
Flushing’s most storied firm, Prince & Sons—where they read botanical
papers, chanted poetry, and crowned a statue of Linnaeus with flowers,
while Governor DeWitt Clinton praised the extension of “the empire of
useful truths in Botany and Husbandry.”22 William Prince, proprietor of
19
S. A. Beach, The Apples of New York (New York, 1902); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological
Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Westport, Conn., 1986), 157.
20
Copy of a manuscript letter from Oliver J. Tillson to Helen Miller Gould, daughter of Jay
Gould, Oliver Tillson Papers, box 8: “Receipts,” Kroch Library Manuscript and Special Collections, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
21
Burn Them [pseud.], “What Shall I Do with My Apples,” Religious Intelligencer, 6 Oct.
1827, 299; William Kerrigan, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural
History (Baltimore, 2012), 19, 189.
22
Celebration at Flushing of the Birthday of Linnaeus, by the New-York Branch of the
Linnaean Society of Paris (New York, 1824), 3–5.
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Cataloging Nature / 411
Prince & Sons, had good reason to celebrate botany’s most famous name.
Prince’s recent inclusion among the 136 foreign corresponding members of
the London Horticultural Society (LHS) had not only added over a
hundred botanical gardens to his list of global contacts, but had also
raised his profile among the LHS’s wealthy plant collectors.23 His 1823
catalog displayed relationships with dozens of botanical luminaries, as
well as the “interchange of civilities with Botanical Gardens in different
quarters of the Globe” and regular importations from China and Paris.24
Like other major American nurserymen, Prince drew both new
plants and credibility from a global network of botanical gardens. Built
on a foundation of medical gardens and private collections in the seventeenth century, this network had been bolstered in the eighteenth
century by state gardens such as the Royal Gardens at Kew and the
Jardin du Roi (later the Jardin des Plantes) at Versailles—which had,
in turn, established competing subsystems of colonial botanical
gardens.25 By moving seeds and cuttings, these gardens determined
colonial fortunes; for example, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean
were saved from global cane epidemics by a supply of new varieties in
the 1790s.26 Simultaneously, botanists embarked on inventories of
domestic plants, hoping to find unknown local treasures or substitutes
for expensive exotics, to reverse a reliance on imports.27
Botanical gardens supplied botanists and horticulturists alike.
However, Prince’s most recent contact had made fruit varietals its particular concern. The LHS was the domain of aristocratic members of the
Whig Party, for whom luxurious gardens evidenced both rural virtue
and the profit that could be wrung from lands operated on scientific principles.28 In 1818, the society had established a new garden at Chiswick
specifically for the testing and naming of fruits. Since the LHS sent
free specimens to corresponding nurserymen for testing and distribution, Prince’s connection gave him access to the 3,825 fruit varieties
whose names would soon fill Chiswick’s first catalog, in 1826.29
23
Horticultural Society of London (Saint James, U.K., 1828), 65–69.
Prince & Sons, Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees, v–vii.
Drayton, Nature’s Government, 85–124; Emma Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French
Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago, 2000); Kevles, “New Blood.”
26
Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish
Caribbean, 1760–1940 (Austin, 2002), 77–85.
27
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, The Enlightenment in the Highlands: Natural History and
Internal Colonization in the Scottish Enlightenment, 1760–1830 (Chicago, 2005); Lisbet
Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 3, 136; Alix Cooper, “‘The
Possibilities of the Land’: The Inventory of ‘Natural Riches’ in the Early Modern German Territories,” History of Political Economy 35, no. S1 (2003): 129–53.
28
Drayton, Nature’s Government, 139.
29
Catalogue of Fruits Cultivated in the Garden of the Horticultural Society of London at
Chiswick (London, 1826), vi–vii, 153.
24
25
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Emily Pawley / 412
Chiswick was not alone in casting itself as a center of nomenclature.
Accurate naming was the central practice of both botany and horticulture. Without an accompanying name and description, plants could
not be exchanged through far-flung networks of correspondence, collections could not be compared, and value could not be determined. It was
for developing a system for naming new species of plant that Linnaeus
was celebrated around the globe, and it was naming and describing valuable new species and varieties that allowed aspirants entry into botanical
circles. Prince’s discovery of the Sine Qua Non helped launch him into
this cosmopolitan world.
Within this transatlantic culture, “good fruit gardens” were comprehensive collections of accurately named fruit. To create a good collection,
nurserymen had to foster a dense web of exchange relationships. For
example, Andrew Jackson Downing’s Rosselet de Meester pear came
from the experiments of Jean-Baptiste Van Mons at the University of
Louvain, in Belgium; his Thompson apple came from the Chiswick
Garden; and his Downton Pippin from Britain’s most famous fruit
expert, Thomas Andrew Knight. However, this stream of specimens
also required an exchange. Here, American nurserymen had an advantage. Where Van Mons and Knight struggled to breed new varieties,
American nurserymen had a thick stack of lottery tickets in the seedling
landscape. Circulated through the system, fruits like the Cranberry
Pippin—“a strikingly beautiful apple” that Downing “found growing on
a farm near Hudson, N.Y.”—eased nurserymen into international circuits of specimen exchange.30
Though American nurserymen started out on the margins of this
system, we should not assume that they were permanently peripheral.
Like many major nurserymen, Downing characterized his orchard as a
site of knowledge production analogous to Chiswick, a place where varieties were tested and judged. “Little by little I have summoned [varieties] into my pleasant and quiet court,” he wrote, “tested them as far
as possible, and endeavored to pass the most impartial judgment
upon them.”31 The absence of an American state-sponsored botanical
garden or privately sponsored testing garden like Chiswick during the
early decades of the nineteenth century gave greater weight to such
claims.
American nurserymen also benefited from the strength of local
markets. By the 1830s, British fruit was in decline—undermined by the
waning of cider and perry (pear cider) as working-class drinks, by
medical tracts blaming cholera outbreaks on the eating of fresh fruit,
30
31
Downing, Fruits and Fruit Trees, 106.
Ibid., v.
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Cataloging Nature / 413
and, in 1838, by the removal of almost all duties on imported fruit.32
Moreover, even as American seedling orchards turned out hundreds of
new varieties, British varieties had begun to suffer from inexplicable ailments.33 While British fruit culture contracted, American fruit culture
expanded, fueled by the spread of rural refinement and the rise of
urban markets.
Fruit Trees as Marks of Refinement
Grafted fruit trees found an important habitat in the expanding consumer culture of gardening. Drawing on a tradition of political legitimacy
that self-consciously echoed British models, wealthy merchants and
planters had long laid out country estates in a manner calculated to
express refinement and an attention to the public good.34 In the early
nineteenth century, as Richard Bushman, David Jaffee, and Catherine
Kelly have argued, a wider array of groups produced their own versions
of gentility.35 In doing so, they created new garden spaces. Farmers
planted orchards near newly white picket fences and “ornamented
barns”; urban entrepreneurs established public gardens for genteel recreation; and provincial towns planted their recently deforested centers
with intentional greenery.36 Lavish accounts of British estates, printed
in horticultural journals and journals of fashion, strengthened the connection between gardens and class status. As editor of the Western
Farmer and Gardener in the mid-1840s, Henry Ward Beecher expected
his readers to share his fantasy of “imaginary visits to the Chiswick
32
Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, New Book of Apples (London, 1993), 107.
Thomas Andrew Knight, Pomona Herefordiensis (London, 1811), ii.
Tamara Plakins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among
the Boston Elite, 1785–1860 (New Haven, Conn., 1989). On eighteenth-century tree culture,
see Barbara Wells Sarudy, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake (Baltimore, 1998),
39–41, 127–33, 55–88; and Peter J. Hatch, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello:
Thomas Jefferson and the Origins of American Horticulture (Richmond, Va., 1998).
35
Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York,
1993), 240–57; Jaffee, New Nation of Goods; Catherine E. Kelly, “‘Well Bred Country
People’: Sociability, Social Networks, and the Creation of a Provincial Middle Class, 1820–
1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Autumn 1999): 451–71. On this transition, see
David H. Diamond, “Origins of Pioneer Apple Orchards in the American West: Random
Seeding versus Artisan Horticulture,” Agricultural History 84 (Autumn 2010): 423–50.
36
John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven,
Conn., 1988), 67–93; Pauly, Fruits and Plains, 53–54; Brenda Bullion, “Hawthornes and
Hemlocks: The Return of the Sacred Grove,” Landscape Journal 2 (Autumn 1983): 114. For
more on refinement, see Hannickel, Empire of Vines, 57–58; Kevles, “Fruit Nationalism,”
132–33; and David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore, 1999).
33
34
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Emily Pawley / 414
Garden [and] the more than oriental magnificence of the Duke of Devonshire’s grounds at Chatsworth.”37
Grafting promised both direct access to aristocratic spaces and a
homegrown source of luxury. Few Americans could afford the effort
that the Duke of Devonshire’s servants reportedly devoted to his
“monster” Royal George peach tree, which extended over a hundred
feet of trellis in a dedicated greenhouse and produced 8,727 peaches in
a year. For thirty-five cents, though, they could buy a piece of it.38 Conversely, American seedling orchards, recast as sources of new varieties,
supplied the improvisational provincial gentility described by Kelly
and Jaffee.39 A correspondent to the Genesee Farmer lightly mocked
the novice gardener who “had just read an account of an extraordinary
‘seedling cherry,’ produced by Mr. A., in one part of the country; a wonderful seedling apple, by Mr. B., in another, a no less remarkable pear, by
Mr. C., somewhere else.”40 At a relatively low price, aspiring orchardists
could begin to assemble rarities into good fruit gardens. This culture of
collecting was at its most elaborate within the horticultural societies
founded on the LHS model, starting in 1818.41 At their meetings, pomological gentlemen and prominent nurserymen took turns displaying fine,
rare, or novel varieties of fruit; “By Mr. Richards,” noted one report from
Boston, “Red Juneating, Curtis’ Early Striped, Shropshirevine or Sopsof-wine, Early Harvest, and a kind without name, a small, pleasant,
striped fruit; also Early Bow, a fine, large, well known, sweet fruit.”42
The growing number of agricultural fairs rewarded comprehensive collectors; early exhibition reports often consisted only of numbers and
names of varieties displayed. Through such accounts, published in the
horticultural journals, readers could watch new fruits move through
the system and perhaps decide what to buy.
Sprouting haphazardly from roadsides and home orchards, seedling
fruit had been fair game for passersby and neighbors—but as trees
became a consumer good, fruit did too. In the 1840s, a series of state
laws hastily enacted against “fruit theft” showed the new importance
37
Henry Ward Beecher, Plain and Pleasant Talk about Fruits, Flowers and Farming
(New York, 1859), v.
38
Andrew Jackson Downing, “Mr. Downing’s Letters from England,” Horticulturist 5
(Nov. 1850): 217.
39
Jaffee, New Nation of Goods; Catherine Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping
Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1999), 10–11.
40
“Fruit Culture,” Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture 9
(8 June 1850): 1.
41
Hedrick, History of Horticulture, 505–16.
42
Samuel Walker and William Kenrick, “Massachusetts Horticultural Society: Exhibition
of Fruits,” Horticultural Register and Gardener’s Magazine, 1 Sept. 1836, 352.
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Cataloging Nature / 415
of markets in “fine fruit.”43 These markets were real physical spaces. In
1837, New York City had two shops specializing in fruit; eleven years
later it had seventy-one, and other large cities followed the same
pattern.44 Encouraged by the deregulation of public markets in the
1840s, a new class of urban grocers altered the way that fruit was presented and sold. Public markets had previously been segmented by
time: prices dropped during the day, and battered afternoon fruits
were sold to the poor. The new groceries, by contrast, were segmented
by class: where street vendors served the poor from barrels, groceries
in upscale neighborhoods competed to have the most elaborate displays—and new and attractive fruit varieties became key to their strategy.45 By mid-century, nurserymen felt the pull of these new spaces. In
1852, the horticulturalist James Watts noted that “consumers have
become more particular about kinds.” What they wanted now was
“the Esopus, Spitzenberg, Baldwin, Roxbury Russet, Rhode Island
Greening, Swaar, Talman Sweeting, Seek-no further, Pearmain,
Twenty-Ounce Apple, and Vandevere,” and they called for them by
name.46
Calls for named fruit were satisfied by a new landscape of commercial orchards, springing up around the East Coast and in the new Great
Lakes fruit region. In 1851, Cincinnati alone consumed 24,414 barrels of
apples from the new orchards of Western New York and Michigan, worth
approximately one hundred thousand dollars.47 In 1845, the Reybold
family of Delaware sent 63,344 baskets of peaches from their 117,720
trees to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston by specially hired
steamer.48 These orchards reversed the direction of luxury trade. Even
before the Revolution, London markets had sold a few Long Island–
grown Newtown Pippins, though they were “too expensive for common
eating.”49 After the removal of British duties on apples in the mid1830s, American exports doubled within a decade—Baldwins from
William Kerrigan, “Stealing Apples: Markets, Morality, and the Movement to Criminalize Apple-Pilfering in Antebellum Ohio” (paper presented at annual meeting of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, St. Louis, July 2013).
44
Longworth’s American Almanac (New York, 1837); Doggetts’ New York City Directory,
1848–1849 (New York, 1848). See also The Boston Directory (Boston, 1823); and The Boston
Directory (Boston, 1848).
45
Cindy R. Lobel, Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York
(Chicago, 2014), 63.
46
Transactions of the Second Session of the American Pomological Society (Philadelphia,
1852), 74.
47
“Apple Trade at Cincinnati,” Ohio Cultivator 7 (Dec. 1851): 360.
48
James Pedder, “A Day at the Reybolds in Peach Harvest,” Farmers’ Cabinet, and American Herd-book 10 (15 Oct. 1846): 78–79.
49
Michael Collinson quoted in William A. Taylor, The Fruit Industry, and the Substitution
of Domestic for Foreign-Grown Fruits, with Historical and Descriptive Notes on Ten Varieties of Apple Suitable for the Export Trade (Washington, D.C., 1898), 311.
43
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Emily Pawley / 416
Boston and Albemarle Pippins from Virginia jostled with Long Island
fruit in Covent Garden.50 Overseas taste for American apples made possible places like the Pell Orchard of Esopus, New York, which claimed to
be the largest commercial orchard in the world, producing about 13
percent of American apple exports in the 1840s.51
Nurserymen benefited from both collectors looking for rarities and
“orchardists” looking for large numbers of grafted saplings. During the
first half of the nineteenth century, the few dozen nurseries clustered
around the major cities of the East Coast would grow to more than a
thousand, selling between fifteen and twenty million trees annually.52
Eastern nurseries extended across the continent; for example, the proprietor of the Llewelling Nursery arrived in Oregon by wagon in 1847,
carrying trees from the nurseries of Ellwanger & Barry and
A. J. Downing.53 However, as named fruits and trees became valuable,
they posed new problems.
Disorder, Confusion, and Counterfeits of Varietal Names
Once grafted varieties became an accepted good, names and fruits
multiplied together. Following the practice of using European names
for American plants, for example, the new varieties springing from
American orchards often received old names—William Prince may
have discovered the Sine Qua Non, but “Sine Qua Nons” appeared everywhere. Seedlings of European varieties often received their parents’
names. Worse, varieties often started with multiple European names.
Nurserymen would observe that a customer with a lengthy order—for
instance, for “Beurre Dore, Beurre d’Anjou, Beurre d’Or, Beurre d’Ambleuse, Beurre d’Amboise, Poire d’Amboise, Isambert, Red Beurre,
Beurre du Roi, and Golden Beurre, White Doyenne, Doyenne Blanc,
Beurre Blanc, Bonneante, Saint Michael, Carlisle, Citron de Septembre,
Kaiserbirne, Poire a Courte Queue, Poire de Limon, Poire de Neige, Poire
de Seigneur, Poire Monsieur, Valencia, and White Beurre”—had actually
purchased just two pear varieties.54 When circulating among neighbors
or distributed by agricultural societies, varieties accumulated even more
names. The apple known in journals as the Williamson, after the owner
of the first known tree, was locally known as the Land Office Apple
because the original tree had grown near the land office of the Pultney
50
Taylor, The Fruit Industry, 344.
Paul W. Gates, The Farmers Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York, 1960), 257.
Ibid., 259.
53
Willis P. Duruz, “Notes on the Early History of Horticulture in Oregon: With Special Reference to Fruit-Tree Nurseries,” Agricultural History 15 (Apr. 1941): 88, 97.
54
Michael Floy, A Guide to the Orchard and Fruit Garden (New York, 1833), iv.
51
52
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Cataloging Nature / 417
Estate. Moreover, it was agreed that Williamson had brought the tree
from England, so the name Land Office probably obliterated a past European name, and identical specimens with that name might have recently
been reimported. Through such movements, fruit identities became
uncertain.55
As named fruit became valuable, moreover, it became worth
faking.56 Advocates of the newly fashionable Northern Spy apple complained in 1845 that it, “like all other popular fruits, is counterfeited by
the men and boys who sell apples around the streets. . . . [E]very apple
they can find, that in any way resembles the ‘Northern Spy,’ is so
called by them.”57
Buyers of trees, which did not fruit immediately, fell victim to the
worst deceptions. “Many persons,” warned a Prince catalog, “apt to purchase trees without regard to any point but their cheapness . . . , after the
toil and expense of years, find them, when they arrive at bearing, absolutely worthless.”58 The life cycle of fruit trees left both buyers and
sellers vulnerable—the first to fraud and the second to damaged
reputations.
Nurserymen often blamed failed trees on transient laborers who
increasingly extended the tree distribution network. The Genesee
Farmer complained of farmers’ willingness to rely on “some irresponsible, peddling grafter” who threw different varieties together “promiscuously, without mark or label.”59 Working cheaply and in bulk, grafters
showed how easy it was to create informal orchards beyond the control
of expert nurserymen. In April 1831, the farmer Moses Eames recorded
in his diary the arrival of “two men come to graft apple trees” on his
father’s farm; the next day he noted, “they do 364 grafts.”60 As in antebellum culture generally, peddlers, as T. J. Jackson Lears writes, acted as
“a lightning rod for the anxieties of a developing market society.”61
W. W. B. “The Williamson Apple,” Genesee Farmer and Gardener’s Journal 5 (30 Apr.
1835): 122.
56
On antebellum counterfeiting, see Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).
57
“Northern Spy,” Genesee Farmer 6 (Feb. 1845): 30.
58
William Prince & Sons, Annual Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Plants
(Jamaica, N.Y., 1835), ii.
59
David Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–
1860,” Journal of American History 78 (Sept. 1991): 513; Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, “A Telling
Tirade: What Was the Controversy Surrounding Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Tree
Agents Really All About?” Agricultural History 72 (Autumn 1998): 675–707; “The
Weather,” Genesee Farmer 6 (Dec. 1845): 182.
60
Moses Eames Diaries, vol. 1, 14–15 April 1831, Jefferson County Historical Society,
Watertown, N.Y.
61
T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America
(New York, 1994), 69.
55
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Emily Pawley / 418
However, as Cheryl Lyon-Jenness has shown, they were often agents of
nurserymen themselves, the vanguard of a new consumer gentility.
Most fundamentally, it was simply difficult to distinguish among the
growing sea of varieties. Miniscule, seemingly insignificant gradations in
the shape of the fruit, the pattern of mottling or striping, or the grain and
flavor of the flesh became elusive distinguishing marks.62
The Genre of Varietal Description
The “only remedy” to the confusing proliferation of poor varieties,
declared the Horticulturist, “lies in restricting the right to describe,
name, and publish a new fruit, to competent pomologists.”63 The reference to “publishing a new fruit” would not have seemed strange in
1847. A flood of new horticultural journals, manuals, pamphlets, and catalogs had come out in the 1830s and 1840s. Conveniently, but not coincidentally, prominent nurserymen had a lock on these channels of
communication, editing the American Horticultural Magazine, the
Horticultural Register, and the Horticulturist, among others.64 While
the new journals contained elegant garden descriptions, designs for
new homes, letters about blights and beetles, and the occasional poem,
fruit descriptions—that is, accounts of individual varieties—were a mainstay of their content. When Downing advertised the Horticulturist in
1847, “the description and cultivation of Fruits and Fruit Trees”
headed the list of featured subjects, ahead of “remarks on landscape gardening” and well ahead of “flowering plants.”65
In the 1830s, specialized books that described varieties became a
staple genre. Containing hundreds of pages of fruit descriptions, books
like William Prince’s son William R. Prince’s Pomological Manual
(1831) and Robert Manning’s Book of Fruits (1838) allowed nurserymen
to operate at both of the levels that their work demanded. On the one
hand, such books marked nurserymen as experts worthy of the attention—and the specimens—of a global audience of botanists and horticulturists. Descriptive catalogs of collected varieties were recognized as a
play for authority among major botanical gardens, demonstrating the
breadth of a collection and the scholarly accuracy and judgment of the
62
See, for example, Andrew Jackson Downing to William Darlington (c. 1830), Andrew
Jackson Downing Papers, New York State Library, Albany, N.Y.
63
“Pomological Reform,” Horticulturist 2 (Oct. 1847): 175.
64
See Elisabeth Woodburn, “Horticultural Heritage: The Influence of U.S. Nurserymen,”
in Agricultural Literature: Proud Heritage, Future Promise, ed. Alan Fusonie and Leila
Moran (Washington, D.C., 1977), 109–36; and Brenda Bullion, “The Agricultural Press: ‘To
Improve the Soil and the Mind,’” in The Farm, ed. Peter Benes (Boston, 1986), 74–94.
65
Subscriptions for the Cultivator and the Horticulturist (broadside), 1847, Manuscripts
and Special Collections, New York State Library, Albany, N.Y.
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Cataloging Nature / 419
author.66 However, in cataloging orchards, books of fruit description
also advertised real, physical places of business. For example, Prince’s
descriptions mirrored the varieties available in the Prince & Sons
Annual Catalogue.67 More easily reproduced than images, written
descriptions acted as banked copy. They could be quoted in advertisements for new varieties or reproduced in the puff pieces on new fruits
that circulated in the journals.
Though they followed an existing European form, American books of
descriptions were also shaped by the realities and possibilities of American fruit and print markets. Heavy with colored plates suitable for
framing, British works such as Pomona Londoniensis (1818) were
clearly objects of desire themselves, joining the array of spectacularly
illustrated botanical books that were beginning to reach a middle-class
British market in the 1830s.68 While a few works imitated these forms,
a larger number were, like Prince’s, cheaply designed for rapid national
distribution.69 Priced affordably at $1.50 a volume, Prince’s books issued
not from a single authoritative printer, but from a carefully spaced constellation of them, located in New York City and Boston and the growing
fruit region around New York, but also in expected markets in the slave
states and in Cincinnati, which in 1831 was a forty-one-year-old city of
about twenty-seven thousand people.70
More importantly, like many American works, Prince’s volumes
depended not on expensive images but on precision of language to fix
varietal identity. Prince’s description of the Mouthwater pear began
with shape—“an exact pyramidal form”—and then proportion: “its
height thirty-three lines and its greatest diameter twenty-six, tapering
very much towards the stalk.” Prince described the place of the eye,
length of the stem, and its “uniform shade of rather dark green . . .
[with] a grayish streak running lengthwise.” He considered the flesh
texture “rather firm, but melting,” and the flavor “pleasant . . . with
some sweetness and richness.” Season of ripening and color of foliage
followed.71 The characteristics of taste were significant identifying
marks, just as color and shape were saleable qualities. All identifying
66
See, for example, Jean Mayer, Pomona Franconica (Nuremberg, 1776); and William
Hooker, Pomona Londoniensis (London, 1818).
67
William Prince & Sons, Annual Catalogue of Fruit, vi.
68
Anne Secord, “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early
Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge,” Isis 93 (Mar. 2002): 37.
69
On the sometimes gorgeous, always expensive, and often frustrated efforts of American
pomologists to produce images of fruit, see Daniel J. Kevles, “Cultivating Art,” Smithsonian 42
(July/August 2011): 76–82.
70
Prince, Pomological Manual, vol. 2, title page; John Kilbourn, The Ohio Gazetteer
(Columbus, Ohio, 1831), 108–9.
71
William R. Prince, Pomological Manual, vol. 1 (New York, 1831), 56–57.
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Emily Pawley / 420
descriptions were also advertisements, and all desirable qualities were
also markers of authenticity.
Through catalogs, manuals, agricultural journals, and advertisements, printed descriptions of new varieties circulated more rapidly
than trees did. Fixed by descriptions, nurserymen hoped, varieties
would become true, transparent, safe, and profitable. This fixity,
however, depended on the stability of the organisms described. This,
as Thomas argued, was not dependable.
Place and Shifting Form
Unlike the texts that accompanied them, trees were not perfectly
replicable. Variety forms differed from place to place—a Hudson Valley
apple might be tasteless when grown in Massachusetts. Such difficulties
were well known to American horticulturalists; European varieties frequently failed in the harsher winters of the northeastern states, a fact
that American pomologists had used to justify the development of an
American pomology in the first place. However, Thomas put his finger
on a knottier problem. Unlike island-bound British specialists, Americans faced a territory spanning areas “almost as remote from each
other as Norway and the Great Desert in the old world,” threatening
the national networks of plant distribution.72
In response, Thomas outlined a research program. Arguing that the
single authoritative collection established at Chiswick could not address
the varied climates of the United States, he suggested a network of fruit
tree collections in different states. This would help pomologists determine the differing characters of varieties in different places and establish
a true standard of fruit description. Thomas demonstrated such a system
using flavor, the category that seemed to him to be most stable over distance. He laid out a standard for taste, describing, for example, the
acidity of new varieties on a six-point scale from “sweet” to “very acid
and austere.”73 This effort was not enormously successful, perhaps
because the language of taste was limited to a remarkably short list of
terms: “sweet,” “acidic,” “rich,” and “sprightly.” However, Thomas’s
search for fixed qualities was a common one.74
Simple to make and reproduce, the fruit profile was one of the most
widely used alternative solutions. Profiles were created by cutting an
apple or pear in half, placing one half face down on a piece of paper
and tracing around it with a pencil, producing an accurate line that
72
73
74
Thomas, “Describing Fruits,” 269.
Ibid., 272.
Ebenezer Emmons, Agriculture of New York (Albany, 1851), 9.
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Cataloging Nature / 421
could be cheaply reproduced in a woodcut. This method of representation had been promoted in Britain as early as 1828; American authors
of the 1840s refigured it to meet their need for a fixed character that
could be described over distance.75 In a report to the New York State Legislature, the horticulturalist Ebenezer Emmons postulated that while
size might vary between specimens, the ratio of height to width measured
within a profile was unchanging. Next to a much bisected and labeled
apple outline, he wrote, “If this is not true, we may despair of describing
fruit so as to become useful to inquirers.”76 Depending on structure
rather than changeable color (in fruit as in humans, the sun could
burn skin) profiles promised to reveal character in a way that was incontestably accurate and easily recognized. Despite the popularity of fruit
profiles, a system of fixed characters was never fully agreed upon.
Public negotiation proved a powerful tool not only for fixing identities
but also for determining the value of those identities.
The Pomological Congress and Pomological Convention of 1848
If Downing’s orchard was a quiet court, the first Pomological Convention of 1848 was a noisy one. The seventy delegates were a little overexcited and inclined to interrupt one another. Their scribe, Oliver Dyer,
sourly commented that his record was “as accurate and faithful as any
one person could possibly have rendered,” since “[w]e do not profess
to be able to report more than one speech at a time.”77 The delegates’ agitation was understandable; after years of making do with descriptions,
sketches, and correspondence, at last they were assembled in one
place, carrying with them thousands of actual fruits for comparison.
Together they would spend three days determining identities, rejecting
unworthy varieties, and commenting on the promise of new seedlings.
Delegates expected the national meeting to sweep away all difficulties;
Lewis Falley Allen, the president of the New York State Agricultural
Society, announced in his opening address, “We must have uniformity,
and we can obtain it.”78 Their sense of urgency was heightened by competition. One month later, a rival meeting—the National Congress of
American Fruit Growers—would be held in New York City.
Convention rules confined delegates to the business of varietal
description and rating. During daylight, they were to examine varieties
75
W. R. Y., “General and Critical Observations on the Cultivation of the Pear,” Gardener’s
Magazine 4 (June 1828): 107–13.
76
Emmons, Agriculture of New York, 9.
77
New York State Fair, Proceedings of the New-York State Fair and of the Pomological
Convention Held at Buffalo, Sept. 1848 (Buffalo, 1848), 2.
78
Ibid.
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Emily Pawley / 422
one at a time. Convention members were to speak “brief statements of
facts” (the limits of brevity can be seen in a rule limiting delegates to
two ten-minute speeches). Other matters were confined to “evenings
and intervals.”79 Delegates attended not to share ideas, but to winnow
through the hosts of varieties. Most attendees would have been acclimated to such rituals of sequential judgment from their service on the
“fruit committees” at their local agricultural fairs—indeed, it was there
that they gained the credibility and experience needed to act as
experts. During the days of the meetings, and during the annual meetings that followed, they struggled to make reputations for particular varieties and, in doing so, for themselves.
Attendees at both conferences came from the several circles of fruit
culture—some were “gentlemen curious in fruit,” while others came from
the commercial orchards that increasingly dominated the Great Lakes
region. The distinction between the two was not always clear. Allen,
who had given the opening address at the state society convention was
both the founder of the earliest commercial orchard in Buffalo and a
noted author of works on genteel rural architecture. However, nurserymen spoke loudest. Of the seven members of the fruit committee who
gave initial ratings and presented varieties to the group, the six whom
I have traced were nurserymen. Other nurserymen also played active
roles; William R. Prince, for example, was the delegate most likely to
break into impromptu lectures contrary to the rules.
With its five rules, the convention moved to take control of the practice of naming. The first rule raised barriers of entry to upstart fruit and
their champions: to receive a name, a new fruit had to be either better
than all similar varieties of the first rate or, if judged as second rate,
hardier and more productive than higher-ranked fruits. The second
rule laid out the boundaries of expertise: names were not to be fixed
until the fruit had been “accurately described in pomological terms” by
an accepted authority—that is, a fruit committee, a horticultural or agricultural journal, a “pomologist of reputation,” or a “pomological work of
some standard character.”80 The third rule laid out a checklist of characteristics to be used in capturing identity, one familiar from the descriptions of Downing and Prince: for kernel fruits such as apples and pears,
this included “the size of the core and seeds, the length, position, and
insertion of the stalk, and form of the eye.”81 The fourth rule demanded
simplicity and particularity in names. The fifth rule institutionalized
Thomas’s call for coordinated testing: “No new fruit can be safely
79
80
81
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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Cataloging Nature / 423
recommended,” it stated, “until the same has been tested and found
valuable in more than one locality.”82 For a variety to achieve a recommendation, it now had to be accepted by a community distributed over
space. Trees that were sensitive to relocation were weeded out.
Both convention and congress were intended to produce a specific
tool—the varietal list: a short list of varieties judged as “first rate.”
Such lists had earlier been published by individual nurserymen, but
now they were to be given the power of collective agreement. The
stakes were high for the trees and for the participants, whose stocks, if
stigmatized as second rate, might have to be chopped off at the collar
and regrafted. Varieties were to be graded as first, second, or third
rate. (The New York City meeting, more optimistically, used “good,”
“very good,” and “excellent.”) The act of judgment, however, was not
simple. Fruit specimens proved to be far from transparently meaningful.
Some problems were physical: Many had been harvested before or after
their peak period, while several were rotten, making their form difficult
and their taste unpleasant to determine. By candlelight, fuzzy peach
skins proved too indistinct for careful observation, and many fruits
had been bruised by transport over hundreds of miles of uneven
roads.83 More consequential were differences caused by rivalries over
distance. Local cultures of judgment clashed at the national level.
“Many fruits which have long enjoyed the most irreproachable character
in one part of the country,” wrote an observer at the New York meeting,
“are found, on inquiry, to have the most indifferent reputation in another
section.”84 Some problems were resolved quickly. The Buffalo delegates
instantly pronounced the Van Zandt’s Superb an imposter and voted the
Yellow Melocoton peach “unworthy of a name.”85 Other fruits, however,
suffered prolonged assaults on their character.
Debates around the reputation of the Northern Spy were particularly
revealing. A much-counterfeited Western New York staple, the Spy’s
reputation away from home was dubious. Mr. Hodge, who moved that
the apple be passed as first rate, admitted that “he knew there were
persons in the room who considered the apple a humbug.”86 This
comment was aimed at Thomas, who had commented publicly that
“out of ninety barrels of this apple only seventeen barrels were found
fit to market.” Defensively, Hodge assured his peers that “the fruit was
82
Ibid.
North American Pomological Convention, Proceedings of the North American Pomological Convention. Held at Syracuse, September 14th 1849 (Syracuse, 1849), 18.
84
“Proceedings of the National Congress of Fruit Growers,” in Seventh Annual Report of
the American Institute of the City of New York (Albany, 1849), 225.
85
New York State Fair, Proceedings, 2.
86
Ibid., 14.
83
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Emily Pawley / 424
uniformly as fair as the Spitzenburg—five-sixths of them were fit for barreling.”87 Thomas retreated, suggesting that his initial experiences had
been marred by poor cultivation. Then, Downing made a fresh attack:
“Mr. Chapin, the originator . . . considers the Northern Spy so poor
that he will not plant a single tree.” Instantly, pandemonium reigned
at the Pomological Convention. The voices of the Spy’s defenders were
swallowed up; the stenographer complained, “owing to ‘the noise and
confusion’ we could not catch the purport of them.” Shouting, Patrick
Barry attempted to have Downing’s statement struck from the
minutes. A Mr. Bissell chimed in with an attack on Chapin, accusing
him of operating “the hardest looking orchard he ever saw . . . neglected
beyond all account.”88 Mr. Coit, of Ohio, attempting to assist, confused
matters by praising the Spy’s “fine color . . . a lightish green.” Because
the Spy was in fact “a fine light red” the discussion ended in embarrassment, and the Spy remained in limbo. At the New York meeting a few
weeks later, Spy defender James H. Watts lamented, “Like every new
thing now-a-days, to establish its character has been no small task.”89
Rejected at these first two meetings, the Spy appeared on varietal
lists in a lesser position as a “variety good for particular places.”
However, its mixed reputation can be interpreted in two ways. On the
one hand, it may show how instability over distance led to the adoption
of more stable fruits. Certainly this was the aim of the varietal lists. On
the other, the dispute may have emerged not from changes in the fruit
itself, but from differences between regional cultures. In this case, the
account of the Northern Spy’s natural changeability made it possible to
smooth over social rupture. Labeling the Northern Spy as first rate in
Western New York kept the stocks of western nurserymen valuable
and kept the Spy alive.90 Later efforts of the society revealed the continued importance of this strategy, producing a catalog with fifty-one closepacked tables keying particular varieties to particular regions.91
We should not allow the seeming eccentricity of these meetings to
blind us to an important fact: as long as convention participants developed a consensus opinion, they were structurally well positioned to
shape the fruit tree market. The large nurseries represented in the
87
Ibid.
Ibid., 15.
“Proceedings of the National Congress of Fruit Growers,” 216.
90
Thomas F. Devoe, The Market Assistant (New York, 1867), 370.
91
Patrick Barry, A Catalogue of Fruits for Cultivation in the United States and Canadas; in
Two Divisions. Division First—Embracing those States lying North of the Southern line of
Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, etc., and East of the Rocky Mountains, including the
Canadas, Division Second—The States South of the line above named, and West of the
Rocky Mountains. Compiled under the Direction of the American Pomological Society
(Boston, 1869).
88
89
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Cataloging Nature / 425
room not only maintained small armies of agents, they also often supplied the smaller nurseries, and one another—and even some of the “peddling grafters.” Their control of major horticulture and agriculture
publications amplified their voices. Rejected varieties might survive in
home orchards, but the new names that moved through the nursery business would be filtered by the men in the room.
Despite continuing private rivalries, unity prevailed. Most of the delegates of the first national meeting attended the second, and the institutions carried on in parallel until merging in 1850. Institutionalized as
annual meetings, such pomological conventions would prove astonishingly durable, eventually producing the American Pomological Society,
which still produces professional varietal lists. This system also spread
beyond American borders. In 1854, the British Pomological Society
explicitly modeled itself on the American example, a reverse of earlier
hierarchies of expertise.92
More importantly, varietal lists reproduced through the horticultural journals began to change how tree buyers navigated the sea of varieties. Only two years after the first convention, the Genesee Farmer
noted that they “had changed the current of taste among inexperienced
planters.” Where once growers had sought “the newest, rarest, and most
extraordinary” varieties, now “we see in the nurseries . . . over 100 new or
rare varieties of the pear, from which scarcely a tree has been dug, unless
for a nurseryman or an experimentalist.” The author, likely Patrick
Barry, added contentedly, “This is as it should be. . . . Nurserymen and
pomologists alone should cultivate and test these [varieties].”93
The Ambiguous Power of Consumer Taste
Though conventions claimed the sole right of judgment, a factor
entered the judgment of varieties that was beyond their control: the metropolitan market for fruit. In the 1840s, marketability was not yet crucial
to a “first rate” ranking. The first rate Early Joe, which nurserymen
agreed was “about the best eating apple they had ever known,” had to
be eaten in the first hours after it was picked.94 Flavor on its own
clearly influenced a variety’s reputation. But what about market qualities
like easy shipping? In discussions, fissures appeared between men who
grew for the market and a dwindling group who were “curious in
92
Thomas Rivers, “Pomological Society,” Florist, Fruitist, and Garden Miscellany 4 (Apr.
1854): 108–9.
93
In 1850, Patrick Barry edited the horticulture department of the Genesee Farmer. “Fruit
Culture,” Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture 9 (8 June
1850): 1.
94
New York State Fair, Proceedings, 11.
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Emily Pawley / 426
fruit.” These tensions surfaced in an attack on the reliable Buffum pear at
the Buffalo meeting. Patrick Barry sprang to its defense, declaring “it
hardly proper to insinuate anything unworthy or knavish against gentlemen who spoke of fruits, and their qualities as ‘market fruits.’”95 Barry’s
defense represented a change in the hierarchies of pomology; the rising
power of midwestern markets and the Great Lakes commercial orchards
had shifted power toward Rochester, New York—particularly to Barry’s
firm, Ellwanger & Barry, which by 1856 would reportedly produce
twice as many trees as any other American nursery.96 While Barry
might stalwartly defend marketable fruit, even he had to admit that
the increasing power of consumer taste made rating complex.
Consumer tastes made even the most commercially minded nurserymen uneasy. Preferences for fine skin were particularly fraught.
Inspection by skilled shoppers and grocers made skin matter, so
growers worked hard to protect fruit skin from bruising, inspecting
each fruit, wiping it to remove any hint of moisture, and then packing
it in sand-filled barrels. Henry David Thoreau, who celebrated the
gnarls, stains, and “rusty blotches” of the “wild apples,” complained of
the farmer who turned a “specked” fruit “over many times before he
leaves it out [of the barrel].”97 The nearly fatal criticism leveled against
the Northern Spy—that it was “unfit for barreling”—showed the increasing dominance of barreled fruit. Where fruit carried from genteel hothouses directly to tables might have benefited from a reputation for
“delicacy,” new commercial fruits had to be tough.
All nurserymen agreed that the beauty of a fruit was a requirement
for excellence. However, they fretted, a fine skin was, after all, simply a
surface quality. The Red Astrachan, a popular market apple in both
Britain and the United States, proved a particular sore spot. A Russian
apple, its red skin was given depth of color by Northeastern winters,
making it attractive, particularly to Londoners. However, even Barry,
who sold it, admitted it was “not a first rate eating apple.” Thomas was
more dubious: “it had been remarked that the apple was good for
market on account of its beautiful skin; when we get within its skin
there is very little left.”98 In selling the Astrachan, were nurserymen
preying on the ignorance of “the simple”?99 Were consumers lured
against their best interests by a deceptive skin? If so, should consumers
95
Proceedings of the Second Congress of Fruit Growers, Convened under the Auspices of
the American Institute, in the City of New-York, 1849, (Albany, 1850), 212.
96
“The Largest Nursery in the World,” Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine 25 (Sept. 1856):
373–75.
97
Henry David Thoreau, The Succession of Forest Trees and Wild Apples (Boston, 1887),
60.
98
New York State Fair, Proceedings, 12.
99
“Proceedings of the Second Congress of Fruit Growers,” 212.
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Cataloging Nature / 427
be catered to, or educated? Was the Red Astrachan, in short, a moral and
trustworthy apple? Later lists would use the morally-ambiguous word
“showy” for spectacularly-skinned fruit. While nurserymen publicly
defined quality, they were also forced to confront, though not to
resolve, their anxieties about the public good and the rationality of the
consumer.
Conclusion
Thoreau’s essay “Wild Apples” (1859) celebrated seedlings spread by
apple-fed cattle and clipped by grazing cows into spiky pyramids.100 “We
have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons
and Knight,” he joked. “This is the system of Van Cow, and she has
invented far more and more memorable varieties than both of
them.”101 Even as he memorialized the seedling landscape, he mocked
the one that had come to replace it. He had “no faith in the selected
lists of pomological gentlemen . . . their ‘Favorites’ and ‘Non-suches,’
and ‘Seek-no-farther’s.’” Instead, he proposed his own list of names for
the hundred varieties of seedling apples to be found in a single cider
pile: “the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods (sylcestrivallis),”
and “the Slug-Apple (limacea∼)” not to mention “the Railroad-Apple,
which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars.”102
Thoreau’s essay reveals not only vivid details of the old wild apple
landscape, but also the dominance of the new grafted varieties. An
1860 letter to the Genesee Farmer confirms Thoreau’s impression
without his melancholy. D. A. A. Nichols, of Westfield, New York,
announced, “The list is heard in every stall in every city market . . .
Rhode Island Greening, Esopus, Spitzenburgh, Baldwin, Newtown
Pippin, Roxbury Russet, and Red Astrachan.”103 More than two centuries after the introduction of apple, peach, and pear trees to the American
Northeast, the fertile chaos of the seedling orchards had given way to
named trees funneled through and filtered by the networks of
nurserymen.
Thoreau focused his ire on names for the same reason that nurserymen obsessed over them: the names and descriptions attached to trees
were vital to the markets that nurserymen built around them. This was
true on multiple levels. By naming new seedling varieties and publishing
works of varietal descriptions, American nurserymen bought credibility
in and access to global botanical networks. Only such networks could
100
Thoreau, Succession of Forest Trees, 69.
Ibid.
102
Ibid., 72–78.
103
D. A. A. Nichols, “Best Fruit for Market Purposes,” Genesee Farmer 21 (Feb. 1860): 59.
101
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Emily Pawley / 428
provide the teeming catalogs of fashionable varieties required to maintain the interest of gentlemen buyers and market growers. Indeed, it
was in part these international networks, and their direct link to aristocratic landscapes, that helped promote the second important aspect of
naming: names were a key focus of the appeal of fruit, whether in
urban markets, at agricultural societies, or in nursery catalogs.
Without names shared by a wide community, fruit varieties could be
the object neither of meaningful taste or judgment nor trade over
distance.
Where the provincial workshops described by Jaffee were superseded by larger-scale production in the 1820s and 1830s, both the
free-for-all trade in grafted fruit and the seedling landscape shrank
with the rise of printed tools for the regulation of names—particularly
lists of rated varieties produced by social agreement at pomological conventions and publicized through the nurseryman-dominated horticultural press. Their control was not total; pomological societies
controlled neither the terms of value nor the continued movement of
scions between neighbors or the peddler trade. However, their effect
was profound.
The story of stabilization of the fruit tree variety does not provide a
straightforward template for histories of the commercialization of
plants. Other varietal stories played out differently, shaped by different
biological constraints or possibilities or by alternative cultural pathways.
Threatened by the instabilities of sexual reproduction, for example, seedpropagated varieties took decades longer to commercialize.104 As apple
and pear growers strove for fruit that could remain identical across
space, for example, wine grape growers invented the concept of
terroir, embracing the variability created by different soils and
seasons.105 However, the story of fruit naming can help us see some of
the ways that the marketing of gene-bearing goods could be coordinated
and accelerated. This in turn can help us understand both the rapid
expansion of an antebellum agricultural economy and the creation of a
landscape populated by organisms ordered from a catalog.
.
.
.
104
Moreover, as Barbara Hahn has shown, some plant “varieties” have no basis in genetic
difference; Bright Tobacco, the kind of tobacco used to make cigarettes, often assumed to be a
variety, is a product of soils and processing. Barbara Hahn, Making Tobacco Bright: Creating
an American Commodity, 1617–1937 (Baltimore, 2011).
105
Amy Trubek, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (Berkeley, 2008).
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Cataloging Nature / 429
EMILY PAWLEY is an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College.
Her work examines the interconnections between science, agriculture, and
capitalism. Her current book project, “The Balance-Sheet of Nature”: Capitalism and Knowledge in the Antebellum Agricultural Landscape, examines the
kinds of science that emerged from the commercializing farms of New York
State. Her recent article, “The Point of Perfection: Cattle Portraiture, Bloodlines, and the Meaning of Breeding, 1760–1860,” appeared in the spring
issue of the Journal of the Early Republic.
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